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Tag: these lines and these spots

Over the meadows, beyond the mountains,there once lived a painter called Klee,and he sat on his own on a pathwith various bright-coloured crayons.

He drew rectangles and he drew hooks,an imp in a light-blue shirt,Africa, stars, a child on a platform,wild beasts where Sky meets Earth.

He never intended his sketchesto be like passport photos,with people, horses, cities and lakesstanding up straight like robots.

He wanted these lines and these spotsto converse with one anotheras clearly as cicadas in summer,but then one morning a feather

materialized as he sketched.A wing, the crown of ahead -the Angel of Death. It was timefor Klee to part from his friends

and his Muse. He did.He died.Can anything be more cruel?Though had Paul Klee been any less wise,his angel might have touched us all

and we too, along with the artist,might have left the world behindwhile that angel shook up our bones,but – what help would that have been?

Me, I'd much rather walk through a gallerythan lie in some sad cemetery.I like to loiter with friends by paintings -yellow-blue wildlings, follies most serious.

by Арсений Александрович Тарковский(Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky)(1957)translated by Robert Chandler

Arseny was the father of the famous and highly influential film director Andrei Tarkovsky. His poetry was often quoted in his son’s films.

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Here is a reading of the poem in Russian set to music featuring one of Klee’s artworks.